CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Pluto is hazier than scientists expected and appears to be covered with flowing ice.
The team responsible for the New Horizons flyby of Pluto last week released new pictures Friday of the previously unexplored world on the edge of the solar system.
“If you’re seeing a cardiologist, you may want to leave the room,” principal scientist Alan Stern teased at the opening of the news conference at NASA headquarters. “There are some pretty mind-blowing discoveries.”
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, now 7.5 million miles beyond Pluto, has detected layers of haze stretching 100 miles into the atmosphere, much higher than anticipated. All this haze is believed to account for the dwarf planet’s reddish color.
If you were standing on Pluto and looking up, you probably wouldn’t notice the haze, said George Mason University’s Michael Summers.
In fact, New Horizons had to wait until after its closest approach on July 14, so the sun would silhouette Pluto and the atmosphere could be measured by means of the scattered sunlight.
As for the ice flows, they appear to be relatively recent: no more than a few tens of millions of years, according to William McKinnon of Washington University in St. Louis. That compares with the 4.5 billion-year age of Pluto and the rest of the solar system.
To see evidence of such recent activity, he said, is “simply a dream come true.”
Temperatures on Pluto are minus 380 degrees Fahrenheit, and so water would not move anywhere in such extreme cold. But McKinnon said the nitrogen and other ices believed to be on Pluto would be geologically soft and therefore able to flow like glaciers on Earth.
Some of that plutonian ice seems to have emptied into impact craters, creating ponds of frozen nitrogen. One of those semi-filled craters is about the size of metropolitan Washington, D.C., McKinnon said.
These latest findings support the theory that an underground ocean might exist deep beneath Pluto’s icy crust, McKinnon said.
